Paul Douglas Caspar

I’m so sorry for your family’s loss. My thoughts are with you during this difficult time

Our family sends you all our love during this difficult time. May the happy memories and the love of your family and friends support you during dark or lonely times.

So many memories with you both. Sending love to you Kathy. I’m so sorry, for your loss and your kids loss. RIP Paul – you will be missed <3

My Brother…my Friend… someone I looked up to,.. always will… musical genius… shoulder to cry on…trusted and loved by anyone who knew him. I’m going to remember him through creativity and being kind to others… because that’s what I think Paul would want.
I love you Caspar,
Shane.

All my love & heartfelt prayers to Paul’s loving family!! My thoughts are with you & remember with great love & thankfulness my times with Paul & you all.
Much love 💕
Laurie
Is. 26:3

All our love, he was an amazing man. We are all better for having had him in our lives.. love you all.

paul you will be missed by so many,you were a man of full integrity and as honest as the day is long.iam so glad to have had you as a friend as they dont come any better.till we meet again friend,i will come find you.

Kathy,

May God give you strength and courage to face each new day.

My condolence for the loss of your better half Paul and your children for losing their father.

Kathy and family so sorry to hear of Paul’s passing I really enjoyed working with him at the depot my thoughts and prayers are with you and your family during this difficult time

I knew Paul from many years ago. Always happy. Always chatty. It was good to reconnect on fb. He told me he was ill 3 weeks ago…. I will miss our chats… he was a good guy… R.I.P. Paul. Teach the angles to play something besides a darn trumpet!

Sending our deepest condolences,

We remember your dad with a great sense of humour and big smile on his face. He was a kind person who always made us feel welcome. May your family be comforted by your many memories you share with him. He will be greatly missed. Christine, Tremayne, Olivia & Alannah xo

Dear Kathy and family, I am so saddened to hear of Paul’s passing. We met at Princess Margaret Hospital in 2019, where we were both being treated for different cancers, and a wonderful bond was formed in spirit, that continued over the years. He was a wonderfully warm, intelligent guy with a love for music and books, and I was very gratified to have Kathy and Paul attend one of my public readings in Barrie. Beyond that, of course, I was grateful for their friendship, and I liked chatting with Paul, either by phone or via email. The last time I happened to call him, which was just a couple of months ago, he sounded positive in spirit, though we all knew that a fatal end was near. I remain grateful to him and Kathy for their friendship, and I send the family my sincere condolences.

Someone wrote in Eulogy to Paul that everyone knows a different side of him. I think this was a very insightful remark. He certainly was many things to many people. For myself he was an intellectual mentor. We’d spend hours and hours stoned, talking philosophy, talking science, talking history, talking art. As a result his constant presence as an interlocutor and teacher, as someone who would suggest I read certain works, I credited him as one of the biggest inspirations for my book, which he read at several stages and provided feedback on, in addition to helping me study prior, which fed to this writing. For example, it was his discreet idea to think in terms of “moving towards the good” which inevitably forced me to study calculus and algebra and develop a general theory of morality. So I’d like to speak of the intellectual I knew in him.

Paul was hard to pin down into any single way of thinking. He did not believe in any religion, indeed was critical of religiosity, but couldn’t be typecast as an atheist. Some things were clear, though. He was a nominalist – although mathematical reasoning was important to him, he did not think that math was anything more than a human invention. He’d say – there are infinities and some are bigger than others, as a remark on the infinity of real numbers and the infinity of decimals within them. He was a positivist. Inspired by Bertrand Russel, whose A History of Western Philosophy was among one of his favourite works, he felt that the universe could be understood in whole by a sufficient period of science, that abstract entities like languages were mere constructions used to symbolize the patterns in reality. As a result, physics was far more important to him than pure mathematics. So long as a language accurately conveyed the stuff of reality, it was sufficient, so in this vein he felt that music was the truest language, one spoken in pure waves, one capable of gracefully expressing emotions in the space of the most fundamentally true reality. That rhythm was a form cut into space over a given time. He was also a legal positivist, a modern concept of jurisprudence, naturally, that all one needed to know of law was where one was to recognize the basis for the fact of the law, that law was just a collection of best practices accumulated by society over time. Not that obedience to rules suited him much! He was his own authority.

Paul loved the bridging point between science and science fiction. He’d talk about light-cones – the relationship between the expansion of rays of light and the slower causalities that were bound by them – especially to explore time travel paradoxes of perception in cartesian space. The stuff of waves always caught his imagination. He loved the works of Heinlan, he loved the book Neuromancer and the opening line from that book “the sky was the colour of a television set tuned to a dead channel.”

Despite his nominalism, literature, film and poetry were incredibly important to him. He was entirely willing to respect the skill of an artist while totally disdaining their perspective. For example, Ernest Hemmingway was an example of an arist he loved in terms of style. He felt he was a master of literature, using tight, forceful expressions, sentences like punches, he’d say. But he utterly disdained his machoistic story-telling or ethos. Ayn Rand was another writer he felt to be excellent and a strong thinker, even while utterly disdaining her selfish, capitalistic conceptions.

Paul took a special delight in literature and poetry. One of the highlights of his otherwise very difficult youth was a time when his English teacher brought the Canadian scholar Northrop Frye in for a lecture. He became an ardent student of his writings – Words With Power, The Great Code and Fearful Symmetry became great influences on his understanding of the relationship between art and rhetoric, rhetoric and literature, literature and politics, politics and religion.

He couldn’t have strictly been called an atheist, but he certainly had no great respect for religion. He hoped in his final days that after death there was just a final end, a cessation of being – he did not want to live his life over again due to his childhood, he did not want to meet his mother in the afterlife, and was certainly hopeful there was no firey hell. But even his final days he said to me emphatically “I wish people could just see they don’t need religion.” For him there was no historical evidence of a historic exodus of Jews from Egypt. Prior to Christ there was Simon of Pernaea, he taught me, who was said to rise three days after his death. The bible was a device of control and politics, with cultural and literary significance, as taught by Frye in The Great Code and Words Woth Power. Factions speaks in a tension between rhetoric and dialectics, defending their views by emphasizing a logical inquiry into their preferred truth, while attacking dissident views using style, appeals to emotion, veiled fallacy, falsity and lie. Religion is this balm, a tool, just another abstract construction which divorces man from a purely physical reality.

It wouldn’t be fair to typecast Paul into any clear system of politics. He’d often say he’d spoil his ballot -not merely reject it – especially sometimes by voting for super-heroes or even himself. So he endorsed no party. But it was clear that Paul preferred a generally more selfless, self-sacrificing way to some kind of selfish, capitalistic way. Not that he could be said to be a socialist or a communist, but it was clear he tended more towards that spectrum than towards politics emphasizing any kind of egotistical self-interest.

Like I said, poetry was very important to him. Several poems were important to him but this was one which, influenced by his readings of Frye, became important to him – The Tyger by William Blake:

“Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”